Parent involvement efforts in Renaissance process: successful, but messy

by Benjamin Herold

For Alicia Ogburn, the parent of a kindergartener and third grader in the struggling Haddington neighborhood of West Philadelphia, the chance to have a voice in determining the future direction of her children’s school was an unprecedented experience.

“I loved it,” said Ogburn of her involvement on the School Advisory Council (SAC) at Daroff Elementary, one of eight schools designated for turnaround under Superintendent Arlene Ackerman’s Renaissance Schools initiative. “I’ve done a lot of volunteering, but I’ve never been this close with this kind of situation.”

Joy Herbert, however, had a very different experience. Like Ogburn, Herbert joined a SAC, devoted months to the process, and ultimately cast her vote for an outside provider to turn around her child’s school, West Philadelphia High.

Unlike Ogburn, Herbert’s involvement left her frustrated and demoralized. Her council’s recommendation was disregarded, and she is one of four parents who found themselves the subject of a District “investigation” into an alleged conflict of interest.

“At one point, I really thought that my opinion actually mattered,” lamented Herbert.

The dust has just begun to settle following the whirlwind first stage of the Renaissance initiative, during which seven low-performing public schools were ultimately handed over to charter operators based heavily on the recommendations of parents and community members.

But with more schools slated to be matched with Renaissance providers via a similar process set to begin this fall, it’s not too early to ask whether what just happened represents a significant advance toward widespread involvement of parents and community in decisions about how to transform their troubled schools.

The big picture

Some have hailed the efforts of Ackerman and the District to involve parents in the Renaissance Schools as an important breakthrough.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a [District] process that has included this much parent voice that had real implications for how resources were spent,” said Lori Shorr, the chief education officer for the City of Philadelphia who co-chaired the citywide Renaissance task force that designed the process.

At the eight schools that went through the Renaissance process, a total of about 80 parents, grandparents, godparents, and legal guardians either voted or formally signed off on their SAC’s recommendation. An estimated 40 to 60 additional parents participated at some point in the two-month process.

Between March and May, each council reviewed written proposals from the approved providers, made site visits to schools they currently operate, and hosted a forum where each provider made its pitch. Their efforts were facilitated and overseen by the District.

The situation at West (which has since resulted in a change of leadership) was unfortunate, said Shorr, and there are inevitably going to be kinks in the initial rollout of a community engagement process of this scale.

But people shouldn’t lose sight of the forest for the trees, she argued.

“I think the fact that the District took this risk [in opening the process to parents and community members] shouldn’t be underestimated,” said Shorr. “It’s always going to be messier this way.”

Undoubtedly, the Renaissance process stands in stark contrast to what happened eight years ago, when the District ignored parents entirely in handing over 45 schools to private managers on the heels of the state takeover.

That stirred up a hornet’s nest of protest, much of it directed towards Edison Schools, which was given 20 schools to operate. This time, there is little of that animosity towards the providers.

“The bottom line is these are schools that were drastically failing and now will be undergoing the most radical change, [and] for the most part, parents and community are on board,” said Scott Gordon, CEO of Mastery Charter Schools, which will soon be managing Harrity, Mann, and Smedley Elementary Schools.

Vision and reality

The District is hoping to do more than merely clear the low bar of recent history, however.

Its Renaissance vision calls for widespread engagement of parents and community members, including councils that stay active beyond the selection process.

In attempting to predict whether this first round of SACs will serve as a springboard for that kind of wider, deeper, and longer-lasting parental involvement, it's important to fully understand what just happened, said Joyce Epstein, director of the Center on School, Family and Community Partnerships at John Hopkins University.

“The fact that a small group of advisors on [seven of eight] councils succeeded with its review and recommendation is a good thing” whose significance should not be discounted, said Epstein, whose center works with more than 1,200 schools in 500 districts.

But it can be a long road from finding a handful of committed parents to complete a specific task to building a lasting advisory body – and an even longer road to implementing “a comprehensive program that extends from a few parent leaders to involving all parents in their children’s education,” she said.

The experiences of parents on the various Renaissance SAC’s show how difficult achieving this kind of engagement will be.

Even Alicia Ogburn, who had such a positive experience as one of 14 parents on the strong SAC at Daroff Elementary, was concerned with the scope of parental participation in the process.

“I would have loved to have seen more parental involvement, and maybe it should have been a parent as a co-chair [of the council],” she said.

Along with her mother, Ogburn tried to recruit parents in the West Philadelphia neighborhood where Daroff is located.

“We went out through the [housing] projects, down the dark little blocks, into the bars, into areas where there is a lot of drug-selling,” said Ogburn. “A lot of the parents didn’t really want to get involved. They are worn out and they are tired, and they don’t know what this process is supposed to look like.”

In addition, the District rolled out a confusing application process, then decided at the last minute to simply accept anyone who expressed interest, whether they had applied or not.

As a result, there was a flood of community interest on some councils, and it became difficult for the District to determine the affiliations of many who joined. It also became complicated for many of the councils to follow Ackerman’s directive to include at least 51 percent parents among their members.

“From what I can tell, the whole process was a lack of communication. It was done so quickly that I don’t think a lot of people knew what was going on,” said George Tilghman, the parent of a 3rd grader who attended two meetings of the SAC at Harrity Elementary before casting his vote.

A Notebook review of data provided by the District shows that Harrity was one of several councils to experience significant parent turnover. Across the councils, fewer than half of the parents who voted at the end were involved in the process from the beginning.

“Our goal was always to have 51 percent parents,” said Yvonne Soto, a District staffer on the Renaissance initiative. “On some councils, we lost parents or had to recruit [more]. But you always expect turnover. We didn’t want to turn away anyone who wanted to understand what was happening in their school.”

The unintended result was a process that often seemed to be guided by rules that were being made up on the fly. The tight timeline for making the matches only exacerbated the confusion.

“It was rushed, and we had to have everything done by deadlines,” said Bettye Brown, chair of the SAC at Bluford Elementary. “We didn’t have a chance to really [consider] the Promise Academy [Ackerman’s turnaround model]. Our school is not a Spanish school, but we had to go visit with [schools run by ASPIRA and Congreso.] We made sure we had the [required] percentage of parents on board, but it wasn’t always the same parents at every meeting.”

For the most part, the District and outside observers have expressed confidence that these wrinkles will be ironed out for the second round of the process.

But the debacle at West, where all of these issues combined to exacerbate longstanding tensions among entrenched community stakeholders, has led some to wonder whether the District was lucky not to experience more controversy this time around.

Isolated situation, or cause for concern?

Perhaps more than any other council, the West SAC embodied the challenges inherent in trying to quickly organize parents and community members to make a high-stakes decision on a tight timeline.

Despite intense community interest in West and longstanding community-driven reform efforts to improve the school, it was a struggle to get a critical mass of parents onto the SAC.

Joy Herbert was one of four parents who received small stipends from the Philadelphia Education Fund (PEF) to go door to door and try to get parents involved with the school.

It was not an easy sell.

“Some of them had really just given up on the school,” she said.

The fragility of the District’s process was also evident in its inability to mediate the considerable conflict among community representatives on the council. One faction clearly favored Ackerman’s Promise Academy as the best option for West, while others preferred a model run by Johns Hopkins/ Diplomas Now.

A day before the scheduled deadline for a vote, Ackerman got personally involved, directing the council to reconstitute itself with 51 percent parents and granting them a two-week extension to make their recommendation.

Eventually, a reorganized 15-member West SAC voted overwhelmingly for Hopkins.

But at the last minute, someone complained to the School Reform Commission that the four parents who had done paid outreach work had a conflict of interest because PEF is a local partner for the Hopkins model. The SRC pulled the resolution approving the West-Hopkins match, and Ackerman later delayed West’s entry into the Renaissance pool for a year.

Although Ackerman has since said that the parents did nothing wrong, a District “investigation” into the alleged conflict of interest has now entered its fourth week, with no end in sight.

Some dismiss what happened at West as an isolated incident driven by unique dynamics in the surrounding community.

But many of the elements that contributed to the debacle at West – the rushed timeline, constantly evolving rules, confusion about the 51 percent parent participation requirement, lack of District capacity to mediate tensions on the council, and lack of a clear conflict of interest policy – were present to some degree on other councils, making it difficult to simply write off West as an anomaly.

Entrenched and opposing interest groups exist in most school communities. And so it was noteworthy how quickly the District ditched its own process – and how officials were willing to suggest that well-meaning parents had somehow done something wrong – when things at West got messy.

The District will take the lessons from this year, including those learned at West, and incorporate them into the Renaissance selection process moving forward, officials said.

“We’re committed to having parents involved in making these decisions,” Soto said. “We stuck to that this year, and we’re going to do even better next year.”